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These days / the world seems to split up / into those who need to dredge / and those who shrug their shoulders / and say, It’s just something / that happened.

While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelson’s incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in Something Bright, Then Holes. Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital room of a friend, Nelson charts each emotional landscape she encounters with unparalleled precision and empathy. Since its publication in 2007, the collection has proven itself to be both a record of a singular vision in the making as well as a timeless meditation on love, loss, and—perhaps most frightening of all—freedom.

Praise for Maggie Nelson

“This third collection risks many possible poetic pitfalls and comes through unscathed through sheer intensity of and commitment to her voice. Over three sections, Nelson employs a consistent narrator, recognizable settings, recurring characters and a few structures closely resembling plots. But it’s not fction. And though each section also has lines, stanzas, and lyric musicality, it’s poetry only in a very loose sense. Instead, it’s a stunning collection of real-world stories shadowed by the netherworld of poetry.”—Publishers Weekly

“Reading Maggie Nelson is like watching a high-wire act. Her books are inspiring . . . Because of her dazzling sentences, I will read whatever the daredevil writes. She cozies up to ideas unlike any other American writer.”—The Boston Globe

“Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation.”—Olivia Laing, The Guardian

“Maggie Nelson has such drive in her language. Things do not dangle of this drive, but rather get resolutely pushed aside by her poem’s forward motion . . . She delivers the goods with fendish delight.”—Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow: A Dog Memoir and Chelsea Girls

“Maggie Nelson is one of the most exciting poetic talents of her generation.”—Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Camp Marmalade and My 1980s and Other Essays

“With a fercely vulnerable intelligence, Nelson leaves no area un-investigated, including her own heart.”—Michelle Tea, author of Modern Tarot and Black Wave

“Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture’s prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn of like fog.”—Ben Lerner, author of The Hatred of Poetry and 10:04

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Bluets, The Red Parts, and Jane: A Murder. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2016, she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles.

Ali Liebegotthas published three books: The Beautifully Worthless, The IHOP Papers, and Cha-Ching! Her next book, The Summer of Dead Birds, is slated to be published in 2019 by Feminist Press. She's also written for the TV show Transparent.